Music & Transformation

Begins Tuesday

Mar 02, 2025

(Photo: Henry Corbin, Turkey, n.d.)

Henry Corbin uses the term visionary recital to characterize a series of tales of spiritual journey written by Avicenna, Suhrawardi and others. He calls them recitals because he thought that musical analogies were the best way to describe what they were meant to indicate, and enact. Music is at the heart of his psychocosmology and is the best expression of a transformed world in which “every verb is conjugated in the middle voice.” Composer Stefan Wolpe told Charles Olson in the 1950s that the middle voice “is the thing that makes music work.” The “sonorous space” (Corbin) of such an animated cosmos is personified, relational and active throughout. In it “[t]he smallest unit of being is two” (Kaja Silverman). Corbin would have been sympathetic to Luce Irigaray’s claim that “It is probably necessary to return to the world of the Presocratic philosophers in order to understand something about the between-us today,” and that this requires recovering something like what they experienced and expressed via the middle voice—a kind of interpersonal relationality that doesn’t inevitably fracture into the active and the passive, and thus into subjects and objects.

As a prelude to this series of readings of Ted Gioia’s marvelous new book Music to Raise the Dead, here are some of Corbin’s musical ideas.

It will soon be dusk, but for now the clouds are still clear, the pines are not yet darkened, for the lake brightens them into transparency. And everything is green with a green that would be richer than if pulling all the organ stops in recital. It must be heard seated, very close to the Earth, arms crossed, eyes closed, pretending to sleep. For it is not necessary to strut about like a conqueror and want to give a name to things, to everything; it is they who will tell you who they are, if you listen, yielding like a lover; for suddenly for you, in the untroubled peace of this forest of the North, the Earth has come to Thou, visible as an Angel that would perhaps be a woman, and in this apparition, this greatly green and thronging solitude, yes, the Angel too is robed in green, the green of dusk, of silence and of truth. Then there is within you all the sweetness present in surrender to an embrace that triumphs over you. (Theology by the Lakeside)

The origins and variants of the "Oriental philosophy" will perhaps continue to be discussed interminably. Only musical technique, we know, is able at once to produce and to resolve dissonances. Let the last word here, then, belong to whoever, as Plotinus wished, possesses "the soul of a lover, of a philosopher, and of a musician." (Avicenna and the Visionary Recital)

Penetration into the world of Hurqalya, into the Angelic World, thus becomes an aspect of the experience which the progressio harmonica offers to our hearing… It could be that this ["theophanic method of discourse"] itself is nothing other than a form or an appeal of the progressio harmonica. But is it not frequent in the Bible for the Prophets to demand the assistance of a harp-player in order to open the eyes of their inner vision? (Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth)

Our primary text is Music to Raise the Dead by Ted Gioia. You can find the Table of Contents and start reading the book right now at THIS LINK.

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